AI editors like Cursor can generate code with remarkable speed using LLMs, handling boilerplate and providing functional snippets for various tasks. However, when building robust systems, functional correctness is only the starting point. Code must also be safe, predictable, maintainable, and free from subtle side effects. Unmesh Joshi demonstrates, through a dialogue between a developer and an LLM , how expert guidance is crucial to transform an initial, p...

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I grew up in a logging town in British Columbia. There weren’t as many forest fires as there are now, and they weren’t as severe, but as July turned to August people would make sure they always had a full tank of gas and a change of clothes packed for the kids. They’d stop on the street to talk to their neighbors about who was going to look in on Mrs. Kerr to make sure she was OK, or ask the pharmacy for an extra order of tyheir prescription because, well, you never know, do you? Forty-f...

About three years ago I saw a quite curious and interesting post on Hacker News. A student, Christopher Tarry, was able to use cosine similarity against a vector of top words frequencies in comments, in order to detect similar HN accounts — and, sometimes, even accounts actually controlled by the same user, that is, fake accounts used to uncover the identity of the writer. This is the original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33755016 I was not aware, back then, of Burrows-Delt...

I recently wrapped up a job where I spent the last two years writing the backend of a B2B SaaS product in Rust , so now is the ideal time to reflect on the experience and write about it. Contents Learning The Good Performance Tooling Type Safety Error Handling The Borrow Checker Async Refactoring Hiring Affect The Bad The Module System Build Performance Mocking...

Something I didn't appreciate for a while (despite the term backtracking being prevalent in both cases) was the extent to which parsing is a search problem. I don't really mean like, actual parsing you'd do on a day-to-day basis for a normal programming language. In those cases you'd typically try to design your grammar to be as easy to parse as possible so you don't need to think about it so much (though the exact way you tend to make it "easy" made more sense to me under the model we're goin...

Underusing Snapshot Testing Apr 15, 2025 I love snapshot testing . I often say something along the lines of If I need to test something, I write a property/fuzz/randomized test. If I can’t fuzz, I write a snapshot test. Still, today I’ve realized that I have not being using snapshot tests enough, and that I can improve my testing workflow further. Perhaps I can improve your workflow too? Read on! Snapshot Testing Introduction The idea of snapshot tes...

My Garmin watch did not sync activities with the Garmin Connect iOS app upon returning home from a week of travels. It did sync my steps from the day I landed, my sleep that night, and steps the following day. It just failed to pick up my running, hiking, and other activities logged when I was abroad. After a little searching and filtering out obvious tips (make sure Bluetooth is on and paired), I found the key steps and fixed it. How to get the Garmin Connect iOS app to sync Garmin watch activ...

The 2025 Australian Federal election will be taking place when Clara and I are outside our electorate, so we opted for a postal vote. This means no democracy sausage on polling day, but we’re still able to perform our civic duty. Well, that and the fact voting is comulspry in Australia (as it should be, you have a responsibility in a democracy), so we don’t want to cop a fine. We cut the timing a bit fine, but we both got an encouraging email yesterday: This is an automatically gener...

The Orbital Index Issue No. 314  | Apr 16, 2025 🚀 🌍 🛰   ...

“Hello! I am a developer. Here is my relevant experience: I code in Hoobijag and sometimes jabbernocks and of course ABCDE++++ (but never ABCDE+/^+ are you kidding? ha!)  and I like working with Shoobababoo and occasionally kleptomitrons. I’ve gotten to work for Company 1 doing Shoobaboo-ing code things and that’s what led me to the Snarfus. So, let’s dive in!  About this tutorial I first started doing Very Simple Thing 2 with Snarfus, but the more I used it the more I saw the p...

Ruben invited me to participate in a blog questions challenge, noting: I suspect James would find one of these viral blog series easier if it were about books and/or coffee, but I’m tagging him here! He may do with this as he wishes. This inspired me to think of what a “coffee questions challenge” would look like 1 . What questions would I like to answer about coffee? A few ideas to mind, but one question I came up with had particular resonance particular interest: What is you...

Olympus OM-20, Soligor 400mm f/6.3, Ilford HP5+ pushed to 800 Olympus OM-20, Soligor 400mm f/6.3, Ilford HP5+ pushed to 800 Olympus OM-20, Soligor 400mm f/6.3, Ilford HP5+ pushed to 800 Olympus OM-20, Soligor 400mm f/6.3, Ilford HP5+ pushed to 800

Illustration showing the distribution of permanently shadowed regions (in blue) on the Moon’s south pole, superimposed on a digital elevation map. Image: NASA / GSFC / Timothy McClanahan / LOLA It’s now been more than seven years since NASA officially started its Artemis program to fulfill the US government’s Space Policy Directive of sustaining a human presence on or around the Moon. And it’s been nearly two decades since the NASA Authorization Act of 2005 legislated a mandate ...

Name: Kevin Paul Santos Location: Metro Manila, Philippines Occupation: Graphic Designer/Visual Identity Designer Room size: 6 m² (64,5 ft²) Cost of setup: ~$10K Social media: Instagram Hello! Tell us a bit about yourself I’m a creative professional with over 14 years of experience in graphic design. My work revolves around crafting visual identities that help brands stand out across various industries. Currently, I work remotely as a senior brand designer for a US-based company, whil...

Go 1.24 added a new tool directive that makes it easier to manage your project’s tooling. I used to rely on Make targets to install and run tools like stringer , mockgen , and linters like gofumpt , goimports , staticcheck , and errcheck . Problem is, these installations were global, and they’d often clash between projects. Another big issue was frequent version mismatch. I ran into cases where people were formatting the same codebase differently because they had different versio...

The part that makes Rust scary is the part that makes it unique. And it’s also what I miss in other programming languages — let me explain! Rust syntax starts simple. This function prints a number: fn show ( n : i64 ) { println ! ( "n = {n}" ) ; } And this program calls that function — it looks like any C-family language so far, we got parentheses, we got curly brackets, we got, uhh… …string interpolation isn’t very C-like I guess? ...

I want to feel alive, create waves on the internet’s shore, I want to poke the mesh with a needle, let ripples explore, I want eternity in this light, my code to emphasize, I want to be eternal, but I know I wouldn’t realize. I’ve been writing for my past self for most of my life. I’ve written phrases, poems, and essays about what I have felt, experienced, and known. I write to learn, like formatted personal notes, about a topic to make it easier for me to give it str...

I'm short on time time this week so I thought it would be good to look back, some 64 years ago, to Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address. It calls for balance between the industrial-military Complex and the scientific-technological elite. While written for a different time, it's well worth taking the time to watch or read the full speech and think what is says about today's complex world. Dwight D. Eisenhower — Farewell Address The White House, January 17, 1961   I. The American Experien...

Imagine if you could build your own apps and tools just by describing what you want . That’s now possible thanks to new AI tools. This guide will show you how to do it! This guide is specifically for beginners who have never done anything technical before. What We’ll Cover How to turn your ideas into real working apps Which free tools to use Step-by-step instructions for your first project Common mistakes to avoid How to make your creation available to others ...

OpenAI introduced three new models this morning: GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini and GPT-4.1 nano. These are API-only models right now, not available through the ChatGPT interface (though you can try them out in OpenAI's API playground ). All three models can handle 1,047,576 tokens of input and 32,768 tokens of output, and all three have a May 31, 2024 cut-off date (their previous models were mostly September 2023). The models score higher than GPT-4o and GPT-4.5 on coding benchmarks, and do very ...

Gray Alys has come to the internet. IN THE LOST LANDS, the film adaptation of my short story by the same name, had its premiere at my Jean Cocteau Cinema in Santa Fe on February 8, but if you missed it in the theatres,  you can now catch it on streaming, where it opened April 8.    Paul W.S. Anderson, of RESIDENT EVIL and MONSTER HUNTER fame, directed the movie, from a screenplay by Constantin Werner.  Milla Jovovich and Dave Bautista starred. The story was one of my earliest fantasies,...

When trying to write fast functions operating over many bytes, we sometimes use ‘SWAR’. SWAR stands for SIMD Within A Register , and it is a technique to perform parallel computations on multiple data elements packed into a single word. It treats a register (e.g., 64-bit) as a vector of smaller units (e.g., 8-bit bytes) and processes them simultaneously without explicit SIMD instructions. For example, if you have 8 bytes in a 64-bit word x, computing ( x – 0x2020202020202020 ) subtra...